The reason 26-year-old Ria wants to meet her birth mother, she says, is to “find out if I was brought into this world with love”. Searching for Mum: Sri Lanka (BBC Two) follows two women through the emotional and draining process of attempting to track down the families who gave them up for adoption in a country far away from the one in which they grew up. It is as frustrating as it is moving, touching on a wider scandal about enforced adoptions in Sri Lanka and the use of falsified documents to cover up coercion. It is also an honest and brave story about what it means to know one’s roots, and a complex examination of why many people consider this an essential part of their being.
Ria’s story is the more straightforward, if only in comparison to the one with which it is paired. She has lived with her adoptive parents in Inverness since she was three weeks old. “I stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was completely happy,” she says of her childhood. Nevertheless, not knowing why she was given up for adoption has needled her, as has the paperwork that says her birth mother wants no contact. Articulate, thoughtful and wary, Ria explains that she feels stuck between two countries and two identities: “It doesn’t necessarily upset me, but it’s there.”
With the help of Siri, a professional who makes a career out of navigating Sri Lankan paperwork and bureaucracy for adopted children seeking their parents, and after a few dead ends, Ria eventually comes to the village of her birth family. An uncle comes out to greet her, then her grandfather. She must wait until the next day to meet her mother, but when the moment comes it is simple, wordless and deeply moving. Sumitra, her mother, explains through tears why Ria had to be adopted. The father had left her and she was told they were too poor to care for her. She did not remember signing the paperwork, she said. She cried for three months after her daughter was taken. In the end, Ria finds what appears to be a form of peace.
Rebecca’s story is less linear, less complete. She has been searching for her roots for a long time, having only discovered she was adopted when she was eight; she found the papers, by mistake, in an airing cupboard. She is frustrated by a lack of records at every turn. Her birth does not appear to have been registered, as was often the way with unmarried mothers. She is angry at her adoptive parents, desperate for a connection to where she was born, almost unbearably optimistic in the face of setback after setback. Her story ends with a potential family. Her sense that maybe these are familiar eyes, that they have a “connection”, is shattered by a DNA test that proves otherwise. I hope that next week she finds some resolution, in whatever form it may take.
Fans of the Ross Kemp school of television – hard men meet other hard men under circumstances of high stress, personal danger and frantic directions – will have been enjoying Meet the Drug Lords: Inside the Real Narcos (Channel 4), which ends on a surprisingly balanced note this week. Jason Fox – formerly of special forces, the host of SAS: Who Dares Wins and the kind of man that women of a certain age may refer to as “dishy” – has had incredible access to the day-to-day business of the real-life South American narcos who supply much of the world’s cocaine.
It is high-octane and exhilarating, showing Fox and his crew in genuinely terrifying situations, such as when they are interrupted during an interview with a cocaine chef in a secret lab and he must, in military terms, peg it as quickly as possible. It also amps up the action-movie stuff, as helicopters on loan from the US air force are used to decimate a cocaine factory in the jungle.
But it is not the showier scenes that stand out. Fox has a way with the people he meets: he asks the right kinds of questions; he is sympathetic, understanding and curious. He talks to hitmen and discovers that, for all their posturing, they can’t sleep at night. He talks to smugglers, risking their lives every day for tiny sums of money, finding out why they do it, that many keep it secret from their families. It adds an extra layer of meaning to the question of the value of cocaine.
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